Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - Jedyni dobrzy Indianie

Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

Jedyni dobrzy Indianie by Stephen Graham Jones

230 reviews

refrejarator's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

The first I've ever read by Jones. Holy hell. It was devastating, it was brutal, and painted a horror story vastly different from any I'd ever read before. Had me freaked out from the first chapter, which is very rare for me!

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chriswoody94's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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fallknitt's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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voxvenati's review against another edition

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mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This was a refreshing experience. It was tense, gruesome (at times), and full of heart.

Two things I was not really expecting going in, that there was quite a lot of: basketball and animal death - specifically

lots of dogs and elk

.

I was not a huge fan of the pacing. Front bit was good, middle dragged, end was good. Perhaps contributing to this, the early parts of the book set up like it was going to be something like four short stories tied together by this vengeful entity, but the second half of the book was not split up. It was all one story at that point.

Quite a lot of descriptions of gore, some really tense scenes, but just didn’t hit that scary vibe. Unfortunate it couldn’t hit all three points, but I did like SGJ’s style. It flowed quite naturally.

I liked the entity. I thought she was neat. I wish I had been more on her side, but I just liked some of the characters too much to agree with her.

Really solid read despite me not knowing or caring about basketball. Not scary, but a little graphic, so maybe check trigger warnings if you use them.

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stephanieluxton's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

A lot of dogs die or are injured in this book. They don't all die at the same time to it's not like ripping off a bandaid. It's actually pretty upsetting.

Without giving too much away, this book is about a few native american friends who broke a rule while hunting 10 years ago and now an entity/elk/person/vengeful spirit is hunting them down for revenge. This book follows each of the four friends as they encounter the vengeful spirit.

Something this book did well was giving a unique perspective into the characters lives. It haven't read many books about modern day native americans/indians but I felt the characters were written well. Nothing felt super political.

The story starts off with mysterious things happening to Lewis and it's a lot of fun watching his paranoia grow. Then the story gets dark and something crazy happens.

Basically all the main characters are killed violently. I actually enjoyed how shocking this part was.

T

The second half of the story introduces Lewis's old friends in more detail. Some of the pacing gets weird here. This is when I stopped having fun reading. Theres a lot or time spent talking about basketball even though it's not very relevant. When we start to see the spirit, what I was imagining in my head while reading was so goofy that I couldn't feel scared or appreciate any tense moments.

The spirit is described as a woman with an elks head and I kept picturing a woman wearing one of those goofy plastic horse masks chasing the characters.

My biggest problem with this book that is

that I didn't feel like there was any justice. None of these characters deserved to die.

Now to spoil the general story so that I can elaborate on my previous sentence:

Four indian friends go into the woods 10 years ago to hunt elk but all the elk are in an area of the woods that is restricted to them. It's near the end of the season so they decide t go and find a large herd. They kill multiple elk and Lewis kills one that has eyes that almost look human to him. She fights to live but he kills her and finds out the elk was pregnant. He vows to use evey part of the elk as a sign of respect and remorse. They are discovered and kicked out of the woods, forbidden from hunting ever again by the elders on the reservation. 10 years later the spirit of the elk (disguised as a human or elk/human hybrid depending on the day, begins hunting them and killing them one by one. She doesn't just kill Lewis, who was her killer. She (directly or indirectly) kills Lewis, his dog, wife, and his friend from work. They she kills the other men who were on the hunting trip as well as their dogs and basically anyone else they care about or who just happen to be in the area at the time. None of these people were evil. Most of them were just living their lives the best they knew how to. It's not a satisfying tale of revenge.

In the end, I have no idea what exactly this book was trying to say. I also have no idea why it's named what it is.

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nialystic's review against another edition

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adventurous dark

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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karthnemesis's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

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danielles_reads's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Wow, this was wild. This was my first book by Stephen Graham Jones, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Ultimately, it was mysterious and intriguing enough to keep me engaged, and I loved the ending, but the style and extreme amount of violence and gore was not for me.

I'm a character-driven reader, and all four of the main characters seemed interchangeable to me. I kept getting them confused and forgetting who was who. Ricky and Lewis in the beginning of the book even start out in very similar situations: moving out of the rez, being called "Chief" in a group of white coworkers, and imagining fake newspaper headlines. Then I couldn't keep Cass and Gabe straight. But I think that's more due to this book being a splatterpunk kind of horror rather than the social / atmospheric horror I prefer. The emphasis was more on the themes of Indian life in the US, the cycle of violence, and respect for nature, plus the shock factor, rather than real character development.

I thought Lewis' part was super interesting, as his descent into delusion (or not?) was so engaging. I was so convinced by what he was seeing but was still so surprised how far he took the situation into his own hands

by killing Shaney and his wife, wtf!!

Plus all the little details like the fantasy novels he likes to read, and dynamics with his coworkers.

Gabe and Cassidy's section felt a little more aimless (which was a big reason I kept confusing them). Plus there was a LOT more talk of basketball, and while I was clueless most of the time (I know nothing about basketball), it didn't seem to really add much to the story. It mostly felt like stalling to get to the big gory scene.

And man, it was so gory...! The string of deaths felt so over-the-top, especially since there was so much collateral damage (with too many innocent women affected). Plus Cassidy was so stupid for putting his money in a nondescript thermos under his truck (??), which led to so much disaster independent of the elk woman. I also didn't like how Nathan and his dad somehow survived their death scenes that seemed extremely final just to move the plot along. None of the women got dramatic "they're alive!" scenes either... was that intentional?

It was all just too much for me--not necessarily because I'm sensitive to violence, but because the sheer amount of it felt so cartoonish.

I really did like Denorah's section, even though she also focused a bit too much on basketball for my taste (

and how did Elk Woman get so good at basketball anyway? lol

). Her fear felt so palpable and tense, as did her emotions after

realizing her dad had died.

Her and

Elk Woman

had an interesting dynamic. I also liked the second person sections about the elk, which made the whole thing seem so much spookier as well as totally justified from her point of view. So eerie!

I was going to give this a flat 3 stars since I recognize it's good but not really my style, but I did really love the ending. I love how poetic it is,

ending in the same location as where the whole story started, at the lake. I love that one of the MC's daughters is the one who stops the cycle of violence from continuing, as another Indian (I think? her stepdad's race was never confirmed) man with a gun tries to kill more elk. And I love the weird supernatural birth of yet another calf that the Elk Woman could protect, as the human "calf" she was going to kill protecting her.

I couldn't think of a better way to end this wild and violent book. What a mind Jones has.

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spinebreakr's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I was enthralled with this right up until

elk head woman transformed into a human.

which unfortunately is pretty early on in the book.
The writing was tense and emotional. You could really feel the weight of generational trauma resting on the shoulders of the main characters. The way it informs all their actions is raw and drawn from a very real place. The character work is super well done. But ultimately, the monster in the story is not nearly so scary as what the men do to the ones they love.

Once we started getting chapters from the perspective of the monster, I had such a hard time being scared of her. I came to this book expecting horror and I just wasn't gripped at any point. The gore was pretty visceral at times. Very graphic, and overdone in some spots. For example

Scalping Shaney with a motorcycle??

Yeah it was horrific, but also so wildly over the top, it immediately pulled me out of the story.

Overall, I feel like it started off strong but lost direction a little as it went.
I still recommend. But only If when you read this book you treat it like a Halloween-esque slasher film. Do that and you'll have a great time.

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pipettesandpages's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones follows a group of friends who committed an act that betrays their culture, traditions and their elders. While some of these characters are more haunted than others from this event, all will be subjected to atone for the act committed in their youth.

This book had me picking my jaw up off the floor so many times! Jones has created this raw and gritty story on what happens when a tradition is broken and the attempts to run away from it. While you are with some of the characters more than others, each one is met with a horror that I could not imagine encountering. Watching this characters descend into madness was both horrifying and intriguing.

The first several chapters in the book is slow, but once it hits the fan, the book is so action packed and unpredictable in the best way possible. I love how Jones weaved Blackfeet tradition throughout the story. I want to read more of his work!! I will warn that there is extremely graphic events involving animals and those parts are the hardest to get through. I was not initially warned about this going in.

I know many of the complaints about this book is the way in which it was written. It is a very relaxed way of story telling, almost like someone is telling you ghost stories by a fire. I ultimately think this way of telling the story only highlights Indigenous traditions as well as making you feel like you are present in the moment.

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